A History Of The Greek-Speaking Peoples
by KingAlanI
Summary: A game of Civilization II in which I played as the Greeks, the history written in character by the current leader in past tense.
1. Empire

Greek Prime Minister Alexander XVII On His Nation

Part I – The Empire – From Founding Until 3474 After Founding

Six thousand years ago, a great man rose up on the banks of the River Athena. Emperor Alexander I led the Greek people out of a nomadic lifestyle and it is in his honor that all subsequent leaders of the nation of Athens bear his name.

The founders had realized that man could bend the landscape to his will. Half of our early tribe formed a settlement and the other half continued its travels, to find a place for another. Yet first they laid paths on the north bank of the River Athena. Railroad tracks lay there today instead of crude dirt trails, but our ancestors' choice of location had proved sound.

After building that road, they returned to Athens and floated west on rafts on the River Athena. It turns out the great river did end – it seems silly to believe it did not, but for those early Greeks, those few hundred miles really had been the whole world. Athens had raised a band of Warriors, and they headed east on the river while the Settlers went west. Even then, they were weak combatants, best suited for keeping order over civilians – and exploring. In the west, the River Athena ended in a trickle. In the east, it ended in a massive lake – what we now know as the Greco-Persian Ocean, but then as now, the only realistic way to explain new things is in terms of what one already knows.

The northeast had more rich grasslands. That was going to be a fine place for another settlement once Athens produced more restless travelers to establish it. The east had another river. Legend has it that it was discovered four centuries after the founding of Athens, that finding a place much like home, the man leading the settlers stood up and bellowed "This is Sparta!"

For centuries, those cities simply grew in place. The people of that era's Athens and Sparta must've found their towns gigantic at three myriads of people each. Now the glorious city has a population of ninety-one myriads, its first brother two hundred and seventy six, in a world full of many settlements that size. Athens began organizing an army of more than ragtag warriors. Our people had known how to fuse copper and tin into bronze since the beginning. We finally started using the alloy for more than trinkets. Explorers near Sparta found a unit of archers that pledged itself to our cause; bows were the guns of their era.

Settlers from Athens intended to head to the northeast lands instead went northwest, and so Thermopylae became the third town in the empire, two millennia into its existence. Yet the land now known as the Corinth Peninsula was soon to know Greek civilization.

The gods were worshipped by this time, although the great temples had not yet been built. I wasn't sure whether it was bunk or not, but I was sure it kept the people calm when naked force of soldiers or police wouldn't suffice. Even in the old days, there were limits to that. And even back then, local productivity was shot to hell when diverting lots of people to entertainment in an attempt to pacify the others.

Towards the end of the Imperial Period, there were roads all the way between Sparta and Thermopylae, between Athens and Corinth, but not between the two sets. Then as now, Greece seemed known for its paths. Then as now, not only did it facilitate movement of major units, it was a boon to trade from helping laborers and merchants move goods around. From that stemmed the gold and new ideas that both built our civilization.

Following the River Spartacus north, it ended in a trickle as did the west side of the River Athena. However, that was near the southern coast of another massive lake and in the middle of yet more fertile grasslands. Between the river and the lake was perfect territory for the settlement that became known as Delphi.

The land had many plots of trees and the coasts had some collections of mighty sea beasts, so the empire could build things instead of simply eat. One of the forests to the southwest of Athens had worms that produced a fabric that was sturdy, yet smooth and beautiful. That would be one of the many trade items on which our empire was built.

The first legal inscriptions appeared around this time – a haphazard set of early Greek letters, but the closest thing the empire had yet had to writing. Greek coinage was also new during this era, and bore some of the same letters. A single drachma was a copper-plated zinc trinket now, but back then, it was a reasonably substantial silver piece about the size of the modern copper five drachmae. A few of those early stamped lumps are some of the most prized property of the governmental historical museum. Though now our coinage is precisely machined with more detailed inscriptions, we still use much the same design with the goddess Athena's head on one side and an owl on the other side.

The Greeks of that time could see much unsettled land to the north and south of the empire, and some to the west. Even those early leaders had dreams of expanding our territory to fill what we now know as the Greek Continent, but they hadn't thought of lands beyond it. It was harrowing enough for the Greek men of the time to travel a short distance from the shore in search of fish.

The Emperor's power had been absolute; our wise men had been developing a system that still had a single powerful leader, but with more control granted to the local aristocrats. This seems backwards now, for even the Greeks were not always the most civilized of men, but what would be known as Monarchy would be the next step in the development of our people. Acting in their own self-interest, those local lords would ensure that better use was made of the great resources of our land.


	2. Kingdom

Part II – The Kingdom – From 3475 After Founding to 4220 After Founding

King Alexander I succeeded an innumerable Emperor Alexander to the rule of Greece. The empire turned kingdom still took up only the central third of what we now know as Greece. Some irrigation infrastructure to the northeast of Thermopylae would be the first part of the Greek realm to take advantage of the efficiency of the local aristocrats' management, on their monarchs' behalf or on their own behalf. For the sake of the Greeks, it worked.

The kingdom didn't expand much after the crowning of the first King Alexander, just gathering its strength where it lay. The only new colony in the first six centuries was Pharsalos, slightly to the south of Sparta and west of Delphi. However, after that, the kingdom soon began expanding beyond the narrow central portion of the Greek continent. Within mere decades of the establishment of Pharsalos, Knossos rose in the north and Argos in the south.

Yet a more important structure was rising in Athens – Marco Polo's Embassy. It would be a way for traders to contact peoples from all over the world on behalf of the Kingdom of Greece. The kings Alexander of the time, for construction lasted through multiple realms, realized that they might know things that even our wisest men didn't, and we would know things those foreigners didn't. The Greeks had never built such a massive structure before, but travelers had distributed rumors of different projects of comparably wondrous scale in other lands. Those travelers might be some of the very same people the Embassy would utilize. Today, such travel simply requires a tolerance for planes. Then, it required balls of bronze, steel not having been invented yet.

Most of our rulers were enlightened men then as now, and most of the wise men were wise enough to understand the value of advertising intelligence. _Supposedly the smarter the man the larger his penis and the greater his ability to use it. Smart men were still men. _However, the latter often didn't work. Even more so then than now, brawn was often admired to the exclusion of brains.

Well, the ranks of the Greek Army could organize such men and channel their tendencies to the national good. Barracks and bronzesmiths in the East raised divisions upon divisions of phalanxes, some to garrison their home cities and some to travel across the great Greek roads to guard the rest of the Kingdom. Not knowing of external enemies, they served mainly to maintain public order amongst a growing populace. Also, a military, then as now, had to protect its government and people from unknown threats as well as customizing plans to known threats. Brawn was even more important to the force back then. It took an incredible amount of strength to carry the sheer weight of the era's weapons and armor, and to use those weapons – draw the bow, swing the blade or bludgeon. Our army was still the world's gold standard of physical fitness, don't get me wrong, but rifles and bulletproof vests did not place such demands on their users.

The completion and opening of Marco Polo's Embassy was truly one of the greatest moments in the history of the Greek civilization. It seemed our wise men had learned as much in those few years as they had in the preceding thousands, and they taught the world what we knew. Such spread of knowledge would benefit all of humanity, even the non-Greek parts of it. It would save our wise men the time researching such concepts themselves, and hopefully enable them to study the most advanced concepts in the world. The wise men of the other nations would likely share such ideas amongst themselves anyway, or discover them on their own. So the Greeks might as well get what we could for such knowledge first. That strategy held true until nearly the present day.

Boadicea of the Celts, Tokugawa of the Japanese, Louis of the French, Cleopatra of the Egyptians, Xerxes of the Persians and Indira of the Indians all became familiar to our people at that time.

They would not become intimately familiar to our military personnel for several centuries, and that seemed just as well to me, for the prudent leader would not try to destroy another nation to add to the glory of his own when the attempt stood such a high chance of destroying his own. There was of course the risk of counterattack, but also of expending the nation's men and resources in a futile endeavor.

Some less literate Greeks minced Boadicea's name as 'bulldyker', and combined with rumors about a woman powerful enough to command an empire, language was given the 'dyke' slang for women attracted to other women. I wondered what her husband thought of that when the talk made it back to Celtic territories. I also wondered why the Greeks found the rumor denigrating, considering the verses of Sappho. Well, her name or the name of her home island Lesbos off the eastern coast were more often used for the practice amongst Greeks themselves, 'dyke' used for foreigners of a similar mind. Such dismissive behavior made it clear that not all Greeks were so enlightened as we fancied ourselves to be.

Around this time, the Greek letters finally began to be organized into writing, so at this point my history starts to become much more complete with more material to draw on. It must've been hard to keep track of the sheer volume of the new knowledge of the time, but The Republic stood out. As a monarchy granted some control to local lords, a republic further spread out power amongst many common people. The same spirit of reform that replaced an emperor with a king would replace a king with what would be called a 'consul', chosen by the people rather than by his father's taste in wives. King Alexander XXVIII explaining his abdication would become one of the first great works of Greek literature, and of political theory anywhere in the world.


	3. Early Republic

Part III – Early Republic - From 4300 After Founding to 5120 A.F.

The first Greek Republic was proclaimed after decades of revolution following King Alexander XXVIII's legendary abdication. The wise men calculated that it was 4300 years from when Emperor Alexander I crowned himself.

Many local rulers resented losing their power and mobilized to fight against such; however, many arguments had to do with the exact mechanisms of how the common people would choose their leaders.

The larger cities felt that their higher populations made their concerns proportionally more important. The smaller cities obviously did not agree. They did not want to be part of a nation whether they were legally overwhelmed by their larger brethren, and felt the land area surround their settlements was also important to the country.

It was determined that larger cities would have more votes, but not proportionally more. The first myriad would lead to one vote, but it would take two more myriads for the city to have a total of two votes, three more than that to earn a third vote, and so on and so forth. That formula more than a millennium and a half old is still used today.

_Until such enumeration shall be made, the City of Athens shall be entitled to chuse _[sic] _six, Sparta three, Thermopylae five, Corinth three, Delphi three, Pharsalos two, Knossos two and Argos two._

So the first Senate sat with twenty-six men. The Greek national legislature has grown since then, and seated a fair amount of women, but the tradition of obstructing the consul or prime minister has remained much the same since those early days. That was a key part of their role, as grudgingly as I the Prime Minister admit it. At least there weren't any war efforts to interfere with at the time.

Greek explorers soon learned you couldn't go much further north on the continent than Knossos. However, astronomical observations already indicated by that time that our homeland was near the south of the world.

This was further confirmed by the maps the Embassy traders brought back – we traded cartographical knowledge with the foreigners as well as the results of scientific inquiry. This saved us so much trouble fielding a fleet of ships and stumbling around the world, especially given the rickety triremes of the age. To sail on one of those would have been suicide, to order it out manslaughter; the Greeks never fielded any.

With exchange of both maps and research scrolls, what we received from one nation we could trade to another to further the process.

France was equally far south, Japan just as far north, Egypt somewhat in the middle of the world. Although it seemingly passed unnoticed at the time, part of India had been found between Egypt and France. The locations and extents of Celtic and Persian territory were wholly unknown then, as odd as that may seem now to people of the modern world.

Despite the north of the continent ending near Knossos, there was much of the same fertile grasslands and rich forests to the south; Herakleia was only the beginning of the Greek colonization in that area. The west had at least enough room for Mycenae. As those cities' new senators were seated in 4660 After Founding, the Senate expanded to thirty-two.

Another even number. Those who laid out the constitution of the Greek republic had of course foreseen tied votes, but perhaps hadn't foreseen how common they'd be. Fortunately, the secondary consul, usually a political ally of the consul, had the authority to cast tiebreaking votes. That's all that many people thought he did besides sitting around and waiting for the consul to die. However, he could also preside over Senate deliberations – that was a part of political mechanisms confusing even to some politicians, but the post did direct a lot of soft power its controller's way.

It was much harder to keep order in a republic, chiefly because the public voted against military enforcers on an understandably consistent basis. As such, most garrisons had been reduced or disbanded entirely, certainly not expanded, the surplus equipment and training facilities being sold for scrap.

However, the freedom offered by a republic fueled much technological, economic and industrial development, more than enough to approach the problem in other ways. Building expertise could raise colossal structures for public entertainment of all sorts. Five millennia into Greek history, all but the smallest cities had one or were raising one. Spartans of today and those of that era sat on the same seats to watch the same kinds of fights, although less and less often being to the death, as part of the march of progress.

I felt I could speak without hubris when calling Athens not only the greatest city in the republic but the whole world, in large part because it had raised the greatest of those entertainment structures. The Globe featured some of the usual fare, but it was dedicated to the works of Goulielmakis Dorukounima. His reputation has only grown over time, but he had nevertheless been widely respected even his own time, unlike many great artists. He could write anything from masterpieces of tragic drama to riotous comedies. His histories veered closer to political propaganda and pandering to the powers-that-be than his admirers liked to admit, but they were still epic stories. The Greeks always had a strong tradition of theatre, but with the government of the era raising the Globe, it played to as large a crowd as baser entertainments.

It took awhile to rename the Colonial Office to the Settlement Office, but the change in its mission had long since existed in fact. Its establishments were full members of the Republic commensurate to their size. This was instead of property of the Emperor, King, or even the older larger cities as a whole.

Whatever they were called, many modern Greeks such as myself couldn't quite explain why they had jammed Thessalonica on the western coast of Greece barely south of Mycenae. I suppose the two cities as they stood today may well be slightly larger than Mycenae would have been on its own, but competition between the two for the lands of the western peninsula was a continuing sore point in the Senate which required consular intervention. Ephesos and Rhodes both had much more territory to themselves going down the southwestern coast like Herakleia on the southeastern shore. Astute students of modern geography would note that the continent extended further south, the site of more cities. However, the Greek people had for centuries been happy with Lake Herakleia Australis as our southern border. There was a lot north of that to be happy about in the days of the early republic.


End file.
